Goodbye, Carpool.

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Carpool is terrible.

That’s right. I’m writing a blog post about carpool. The people of this world who are doing real things, like anything related to accounting, delivering babies, or the Ebola virus, are entitled to roll their eyes. A friend of mine from high school (Hi, Genya Dana!) has a PhD and is now a Senior Science Policy Officer at the U.S Department of State. She sometimes reads my blog, and if she reads this post I would expect her to roll her eyes. I’m totally fine with it. I would too.

But … silly as it is, this is my life. Right now my world is wrapped up in figuring out the public school system and potty-training my middle child, and those two things pretty much leave me spent by the end of the day. It’s a damn good thing I’m not working at the Center for Disease Control or the U.S. Department of State. Just the thought of it makes me panicky; the stress of it all would render me asleep under my desk by noon.

When I first became a stay-at-home mom, I had all these ideas of what certain mom-like things would be like. Carpool was one mom task I figured I’d be doing eventually. It sounds so fancy: carpool. You hear of parents sitting in the carpool line, and I never quite got a grasp on how horrible it really is. After three days of waiting for 30 minutes, twice a day, in an ass-long line of cars with small children screaming from the backseat, I mentioned to Maverick that maybe he could ride the bus.

The bus!!!!!! His eyes lit up with excitement. Desperation eroded whatever worries I had about putting my 5-year-old on a big yellow school bus, and on Monday morning I got us all dressed and began the long walk to the end of our street. We stood at the busy corner and we waited. Not ones to waste time, Maverick and Asher spent the longest 8 minutes of my life throwing pine cones, sticks, and rocks at cars (NO!), into the street (again, NO!), at houses (NO!), and at each other (NO!). They then proceeded to stand in ant hills, peel bark off pine trees and dig holes in someone’s yard, all while I tried to stop them and keep the baby out of harm’s way and smile and wave to the people who drove by as if all was well, so they would not notice that I was completely losing my mind.

10419423_10154591515615508_8493671473271911538_nAnd then, the bus arrived. The driver took one look at us and asked which house we live in. When I told her, she said “I’ll stop in front of your house from now on — it’s much safer there.” And I thanked her for making my life exponentially easier as I tried to keep Asher from boarding the bus behind his brother.

I planned to get a picture of Maverick as he climbed into the school bus for the first time, but it was too late. As I was talking to the driver, he found a window seat and waved excitedly as they pulled away and Asher sobbed.

At 3:40 that afternoon, the bus came back and deposited my child, as if by magic. He’s been taught and fed two meals — breakfast and lunch — and transported to and from our home without me doing anything except getting him out the door. Public school is the bomb, y’all. So far I am completely a fan, definitely the mom who goes overboard with appreciation to everyone who plays a part in my son’s education because I CANNOT DO IT WITHOUT THEIR HELP.

So THANK YOU, Mrs. L the bus driver. I would have hugged you, but you said you had to go.

 

On Taking Risks.

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If someone asked me to come up with a title for the recurring theme for my life, it would be Oh, Shit. Apologies to my mother and grandmother, who will eventually read this.

I get opportunities and I take them, and then eventually find myself thinking oh, shit. This applies to every job and internship I’ve ever had, the times I’ve had to perform any type of public speaking, each time I found myself gestating a child, and pretty much any time I’ve had to either meet a deadline or do something new. Right now my oh, shit pertains to telling Jill Smokler of Scary Mommy YES, I WOULD LOVE TO SUBMIT SOMETHING BY SEPTEMBER 15 FOR YOU TO INCLUDE IN YOUR LATEST E-BOOK. Yes, please do count me in on this amazing opportunity. Because I would be an idiot to say no thank you, right?

And then it came. The oh, shit.

What am I going to write? And when will I write it? This stuff doesn’t just happen … it’s a process. I have to write when I’m in the mood to, in our man cave where the computer lives, and — oh yeah — small children are afoot. Basically? I think I’ll have to pull a weird few weeks of getting up at 4 a.m. to write before anyone is awake to bother me. It’s for charity, the e-book. The proceeds will go toward feeding families on Thanksgiving, so I’m going to pull it together and write something and then hopefully you guys can help me promote it. What’s the worst that can happen, right?

Even though I’m always in over my head, writing keeps me tethered to something solid; it keeps me afloat. So really, by reading this, you are doing a good deed.

I think we’ve all earned a cookie.

Hard to get much done around here.

Hard to get much done around here.

 

This Is It!

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This is it. The day has come. Everything suddenly lined up and I realized that my life is ENJOYABLE and MANAGEABLE for the first time in a very, very long time.

Seemingly overnight, things went from impossibly hard to easy. Robbie is home for dinner and weekends (still a major novelty) and my sweet-yet-exhausting Maverick is in school 7 hours a day. Even though I still have two other kids at home, they are just easier for me to manage — they’re calmer, I suppose. Today we three sat at the kitchen table for lunch and enjoyed the sweet sound of nothing.

It. Was. Amazing.

I have so many ideas, things I want to write about, projects I want to do this year, and after a long period of chaos otherwise known as summer I finally time to think. So please excuse me while I go soak up the peace. I earned that shit.

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Photo credit: Roger Tillerson

First Grade.

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Today I bravely held Maverick’s hand as we moved with a flood of strangers into the elementary school. I looked at the other children and their parents, laden with school supplies, and wondered who else was terrified.

People tell us the East Baton Rouge Parish School System is broken. They say private school is the best option, that things aren’t what they used to be. They say we can’t trust our public schools, that children know too much, too soon; they warn of the dangers of drugs and guns and that my child will be exposed to sex by the time that he’s 8.

But I’m choosing to trust this school.

As we walk through the doors, I note that some parents look just as nervous as I feel. I look away from the big sign that says NO GUNS and I focus on the smiling teachers who are greeting us. They all seem genuinely excited for the school year to begin. 

We walk through a maze to find his classroom. Most of the other boys in his class are bigger than him. He’s young for a first-grader. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe he’s too young. He’s still 5 years old, and most boys his age are entering Kindergarten this year or even next.

Maverick quietly introduces himself to Ms. Johnson. He answers her questions politely and shakes her hand. We find his desk and he sits and begins to color carefully inside the lines. “I love you,” I say. “I am so proud of you.” He begs me not to go. He says that he’s scared. I am, too, but I don’t tell him that.

“I have to leave you,” I remind him. “If I don’t leave, then you can’t learn. And because you want to be a scientist, you have to learn, right?”

And before the tears started, I gave him one last hug and turned away, leaving my little boy alone in a sea of faces, sitting at a desk with his name on it.

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F##K THAT.

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If you are easily offended by adult language, stop reading now because I’m going to say fuck.

I don’t use the F-word aloud very often because it’s unladylike and I wasn’t raised that way. When I was pregnant with my firstborn I told Robbie that I was worried he would say bad words around our kids on accident, and asked him could he please work on his language? Little did I know I would one day be a stay-at-home mom to three children and find myself fighting back F-bombs on the daily. Sometimes, no other word will do. Ah … irony. We meet again.

Sometimes people who have never met me feel like they know me because they read my blog or my articles online, and expect me to be a certain way. Then we meet, and they’re like “Oh.” I’m not that funny, angry, or even smart in person. I’m a calm, mild-mannered Southern girl who has to tamp down her emotions while she’s parenting, and all of that energy has to go somewhere. So I write it out. If I felt like it was acceptable to verbalize my every feeling, such as telling my kids “I hate meal times in this house,” or, “You are annoying the shit out of me right now,” I might not have as much angst to channel through my writing.

Robbie’s last day in the car business was Thursday. He started out as a car salesman at a dealership in Birmingham, AL when Maverick was small, and I was still working at State Farm. I got pregnant with Asher and continued working full-time until he was born. Then, all of the sudden, I was a stay-at-home mom to a three-year-old and a very colicky newborn with a husband that worked 12-hour days. It. Was. Hell.

I remember tearfully telling him I couldn’t go on like this, and he agreed that we needed more help. We moved back to Baton Rouge, our hometown, and he got a job as a salesman at a huge dealership.

He quickly got a reputation as someone who could SELL. I got pregnant with Penelope when Asher was 12 months old, and all the while Robbie was working every holiday (except Christmas and Thanksgiving), every Saturday, and 12-hour days minimum. Pepper was born in June 2013, and Robbie was promoted the next day to Finance Manager. He continued working like he’d been, and I kept on doing what I’d been doing. We were surviving. We were making it work. But it was insanity.

I was grateful to be home with the kids, so I didn’t want to complain … but it was so hard. I kept telling myself it was a season, and all seasons eventually come to an end, right?

And suddenly, it did.

Robbie is now working at the business my grandpa started in 1950, and I don’t think it’s actually hit me yet that he will be home for dinner tonight. We have this entire weekend free! Two consecutive days! This is all new to us.

Here’s what he looked like last night when he got home from his last day. I thought he’d look happier, but I think he was too tired to put effort into it.

20140731_183212-1Yesterday morning before he left for his last day of work at the dealership, he said, “This is weird, it’s my last day and I’m not sure how I should feel.”

I stopped in my tracks and said, “I’LL TELL YOU HOW I FEEL. I feel like I could walk in there with you and do this.”

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A job is a job and I’m grateful that we somehow made it through that impossible few years, but parenting alone all the time? What we’ve been doing?! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK THAT.

Carry on.